India exports to China set to rise

NEW DELHI (Commodity Online) : Two of the world’s top emerging economies, India and China have agreed in principle to boost trade between them.

According to India’s Commerce Ministry, China has assured India that it would step up its imports from the country and also partner India in charting the Asian growth story.

China plans to invest heavily in infrastructure development and assured that a chunk of its imports would be from India,” the ministry said.

However, China is yet to pay heed to India’s requests of allowing flexibility to its currency.

India, along with the US and EU have been mounting pressure on China not to artificially keep its currency Yuan devalued, as it gave Chinese exporters an unfair advantage vis-à-vis other countries.

Earlier, India’s Commerce minister Anand Sharma said, in an era of global uncertainty, the two countries had to grow and co-exist, something which both sides acknowledged.

“There is unison in thought from both sides. While we want to increase our exports to China, they want to rely less on their exports and grow their domestic market and hence they want to import more from us,” he said.

Earlier this year, Sharma led a delegation to China to remove bottlenecks in trade between the two countries.

India had argued in favour of giving more market access to some of its products and in fact submitted a list of items which it expected China to take action upon.

Currently, India’s total trade with China is about $42 billion. However, India imports are worth a whopping $32 billion while exports are worth only $ 9.5 billion. Close to 60% of India’s exports to China are iron ore and oil seeds.